edbaskerville.com

Open Access: The Sooner the Better

ed — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:26:42 +0000

I was just browsing my Science Magazine RSS feed at home, and encountered this hilarious screen when I clicked to read the full article…

How Do I Get Access?

svn revert equivalent in git

ed — Wed, 27 May 2009 00:57:25 +0000

I keep wanting to type

git revert

to roll back changes to the last committed version of something—that’s how you’d do it in Subversion—but this isn’t right. This works instead:

git reset --hard HEAD

Classical Revolution Ann Arbor kickoff on Cinco de Mayo

ed — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:17:17 +0000

I’m getting a first Classical Revolution chamber jam going next Tuesday in Ann Arbor! The first event will be at the Kerrytown Concert House, with other, non-concert house venues to come. If you’re interested in coming, come. If you’re interested in playing, let me know via Facebook or email.

Classical Revolution Ann Arbor
Tuesday, May 5
8 PM
Kerrytown Concert House, 415 N Fourth Ave

XgridLite for Leopard

ed — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:23:13 +0000

The other day I released XgridLite for Leopard, something which should have happened about a year and a half ago. There are no substantial changes whatsoever, except that version 1.1 works on Leopard. However, it breaks Tiger support, so if you haven’t upgraded yet—I suspect a small minority of the kind of people that use XgridLite—you should still use version 1.0.2.

XgridLite: Dual Tiger/Leopard Functionality?

ed — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:44:03 +0000

After confirmation that things seem to work for others on Leopard, I went through and tried to make sure it would work on Tiger again too. I don’t have time to set up a Tiger test box right now, so I’d appreciate it someone who has a Tiger box would test this updated version:

XgridLite.prefPane.zip

Post your success/lack thereof in the comments!

XgridLite on Leopard, Test Version

ed — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:05:21 +0000

After debugging some weirdness, I have a version of XgridLite that works on Leopard, I think. Brave testers, download this file:

XgridLite.prefPane.zip

Then decompress and drag the prefPane into your /Library/PreferencePanes or ~/Library/PreferencePanes

Let me know how it goes!

FYI, the weirdness I ran into goes something like this (as described in a message I just sent to the xgrid-users mailing list):

Hi everyone (particularly Apple folks),

After being out of the loop for a while, I finally got around to getting XgridLite working on Leopard. (Test version about to be posted at code.edbaskerville.com, official release probably by Monday.)

In doing so, I ran into one weirdness that I thought someone might be able to explain. XgridLite simply calls xgridctl to get and set controller state, which seems simple enough. In Tiger, it was sufficient to do this as root using a setuid tool.

In Leopard, however, I found that status calls always returned that the controller was off:

daemon              state               pid
======              =====               ===
xgridcontrollerd    stopped

This was happening inside the setuid tool even when querying it via sudo as a regular user worked fine:

Agnos:~ ebaskerv$ sudo xgridctl c status
daemon              state               pid
======              =====               ===
xgridcontrollerd    running             12656

To get to the bottom of this, I activated the root user on my system and tried it from a root shell, and, sure enough, I’m being told the controller is stopped:

sh-3.2# xgridctl c status
daemon              state               pid
======              =====               ===
xgridcontrollerd    stopped

Miraculously, though, if you run xgridctl via sudo as root, all is fine:

sh-3.2# sudo xgridctl c status
daemon              state               pid
======              =====               ===
xgridcontrollerd    running             12656

This gave me the workaround I needed: run xgridctl via sudo as root inside XgridLite. But I still have no idea *why* this is happening, so I’m writing purely out of curiosity. Why is it that running xgridctl status via sudo gives the correct status, while running as root directly does not? One more wrinkle: running xgridctl c start/stop seem to work fine inside my setuid tool (WITHOUT running via sudo), but do NOT work via a root shell!

Any wisdom would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Ed

Two Million

ed — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:20:45 +0000

Bush’s Last Day

ed — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:04:21 +0000

In Dupont Circle, people were throwing shoes at a giant Pinocchio Bush. On the Metro, things were getting crowded.

Prep on the mall

ed — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 04:13:53 +0000

The madness begins…

ed — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:36:35 +0000

I’m getting more and more excited by the minute. The crowds are beginning to gather–so far, it’s feeling like a busier-than-average tourist season day, but word on the street is than 1 million people will descend on the Lincoln memorial tomorrow for a concert.

The scientologists are here: the cardboard boxes say “L Ron Hubbard Books.” And after seeing the final photo in the set I’m going to go to a cafe to work for a few hours before birthday dinner.